Saturday, December 6, 2008

Hot Tub: Maintenance and Upgrading

By Fisiwe Owen

One of the first pieces of advice to be offered is this: have a back up supply of everything you may need to keep your hot tub well maintained and healthy. There are sometimes when you'll need to add chemicals or shock the water that if you were out of the supply, you may not be able to get to a dealership, and will have to forfeit a soak in the tub.

Thinking about a "shock treatment" when describing how it fits in with a hot tub may sound counter-productive and even dangerous but rest assured, if you have a hot tub, a shock treatment is a must-have. No matter how diligent you are about keeping your hot tub cleaned, everyone gets a little side-tracked every once in a while, and when your cleaning schedule is a little off, it will lead to a build-up of organic materials in the water. When you encounter the effects of material build-up, you will be thankful to have one or two shock treatments on hand, because by adding these will usually clear up any problems immediately. Again, I stress having one or two on hand at all times, so you don't have to post-pone a relaxing time in the hot tub because you need to run out to the store for the shock treatment products.

One part that is common in every hot tub is the filter and that should be cleaned with a hose every three to four months. It will normally just need the water from the hose, but if you find that it's not coming very clean, there are filter cleaning solutions that you can use that will take care of that for you.

As far as draining and refilling the hot tub itself, the best advice is to be sure to read any directions that come with the unit and/or talk to the dealer where you purchased the product, they will always provide important information that should be read over or followed, pertaining to the re-filling of the hot tub. Depending on the size of the hot tub and how diligent you are about keeping the chemicals balanced will also play into the time frame of when to drain and refill the tub.

Hot Tub Upgrading

Each year when the newer models are unveiled, an improvement that is worth thinking about trading up for is the ease of the maintenance for your hot tub. Where hot tubs of 30 years ago were mainly made of wood, they were much more difficult to keep clean and if you didn't refinish the wood yearly, they would eventually just rot because of the exposure to the elements and the exposure to the chemicals that keep a hot tub clean and clear.

This article is not to suggest that each year there is a new and improved hot tub model that you should go out and buy a new one, that's silly and it would be like trying to keep up with computer technology so that you are always guaranteed to have the latest and greatest computer on the market. There really is no way to keep up but with a hot tub, they do last years and if you find you are putting more money into its repairs than you should be, maybe it's time to trade-up.

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